"It's oysters, dear!" Professor Carnegie's prescription and the seeming fate of accounting history in the United States

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Accounting Historians Journal
Vol. 33, No. 1
June 2006
pp. 211-214
Vaughan S. Radcliffe
UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO
“IT’S OYSTERS, DEAR!” PROFESSOR
CARNEGIE’S PRESCRIPTION AND
THE SEEMING FATE OF ACCOUNTING
HISTORY IN THE UNITED STATES
It is always a thrill to find someone who is familiar with
one’s work. I well recall the time that someone first came up to
me at a conference and advised that she/he had read my work
during Ph.D. studies, had thought it marvelous, and so on. I
will not embarrass the colleague in question by naming names;
suffice it to say that he/she is now a well-known academic at an
institution not far removed from my own. The question, I sup-pose,
is, who should be more embarrassed in reviewing such
a navigation of the tropes of conference life, the then student
bent on making a good impression or the lonesome academic
who so very much wanted to believe what was being said?
It was with a frisson of excitement therefore that I found
that our good colleague Garry Carnegie had penned a response
to the recent review paper written by Dick Fleischman and my-self.
I have not had a comment on a paper come quite so soon
before, and so there were loud echoes of that first conference
encounter and exchange of familiarity in work when I first
heard of this note. Unfortunately, the frisson of excitement is
gone, and the familiarity with the work in question seems dis-tant.
Whether more or less distant than that of my earlier in-terrogator
is for the reader to decide.
Carnegie starts well enough with a strong précis of argu-ments
made in the piece regarding the seeming decline of ac-counting
history in the U.S. He notes a series of factors includ-ing
the apparent exclusion of accounting history from major
U.S. journals, a failure to renew the accounting history profes-soriate
in the U.S., the lack of available doctoral training in the
U.S., and the declining U.S. membership of the Academy of Ac-counting
Historians. Carnegie lists these factors without appar-ent
disagreement and then wishes to share in the hope that the
authors, Dick and I, came to in wanting not to believe that the